Magic Imitation is No GoodInside MagicMagic News Updated Daily for the Professional Magician

Usually this spot is for Magic News. That’s what we do here at InsideMagic.com. We bring the fives of readers the very latest from the world of Magic. What we like to call “the Magic world.” We like to call it that but that’s how we roll – that and counter-clockwise with our head facing north. That doesn’t make us bad, it’s our neglect of proper naming conventions for our pets. But, as we say in the world of Robots (“the Robot world”), don’t get us started.

As we said, we usually eschew magic commentary. That can be found on our sister site, MagicCommentary.com. The site is no longer up, because we have never mentioned it until now and we didn’t pay for the URL, ever. It is populated with 15 years of magic commentary that isn’t published to the web. It was read by some hackers in 2019, but apparently found to be so unimportant that they didn’t even have the courtesy of hacking it. That’s the thing about hackers. They aren’t dependable or consistent. InsideMagic.com is hacked just about daily and usually by folks who want to insert the URLs for gambling sites into our otherwise unexciting stories. Stories, we should point out, that are not magic commentary.

We were at The Magic Castle a while ago but recently enough to make this commentary relevant. We saw a performer who essentially performed Whit “Pop” Haydn’s full act. He did the tricks that Pop invented; used the patter that Pop wrote and developed over his years of performance; and the jokes that made both the patter and tricks work to entertain so well. Of course this performer was not Pop. He wasn’t close to Pop. He couldn’t hold a candle to Pop. If Pop and this performer were in a line-up, there is no chance a witness would misidentify him for Pop. If there was a Pop imitator contest – like the yearly festival for Elvis Impersonators – he would lose.

Worse still, he was bringing that lame, pseudo Pop act to Pop’s house. Pop is The Magic Castle for us. He sponsored our membership, he owns every room in the place. His tricks never get old for us because he brings so much to each performance. It is as if this is the only audience for whom he has every performed before. Audiences – be they close-up, stage, parlor, or bar – love him because he has truly mastered all that he performs and that makes him unique. To steal from someone who is unique is decidedly un-unique; or un-nice.

Why are we writing this? What do we hope to accomplish? To penalize the performer who infringed Pop’s work product? It is too late, he’s no longer at The Castle. To give an object lesson to other tempted to follow in his path? Likely not. All of our readers are good people and would not benefit from such a lesson. To get something off our chest that was bothering us? Likely. We normally accomplish that by our rolling on our thick, 1970’s avocado green colored rug. (See our first paragraphs for the call-back).

Even if it is just the chest-getting-off-of basis, we feel better now.